


treat me rough, treat me really nice

by SpineAndSpite



Series: Venus as a Boy [2]
Category: Persona 5
Genre: Boys in Skirts, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-18
Updated: 2017-10-03
Packaged: 2018-11-15 16:02:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 11
Words: 19,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11234385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpineAndSpite/pseuds/SpineAndSpite
Summary: Iwai worries he might be the worst thing to ever happen to Akira Kurusu. Then he starts to worry it's the other way around.(Iwai buys Akira a dress and it spirals from there.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So...I'm not exactly sure where this is going. All I know is I want a fun, low-pressure project that I can work on when the mood hits. This is a direct sequel, so you should read part 1 if you haven't done that already. 
> 
> Rating is gonna go up in later chapters.

The first time Iwai sends Akira out to make deals with gangsters, he worries that he’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to this kid. A month later he realizes how goddamn arrogant that is; Akira Kurusu has lived a lifetime of the bad and unlucky. A petty thug like Iwai doesn't even rank.

Two months later, Iwai wonders if it isn’t the other way around. If this kid isn’t his albatross, a harbinger of destruction. A spider in the evening. 

Iwai doesn’t know many fairytales, but he does know that there are spirits that wander villages at dusk, bearing blocks of tofu and jugs of wine. He thinks someone should write a new story about boys who carry cats around in bags and show up as soon as the sun disappears. A myth about softly wild curls and a smile like the thrust of knife, a pretty mouth and nine lives. Creatures that cast a spell that anchors in your guts and twists tighter and tighter until they are all you think about. 

Iwai doesn't date kids.

Obviously. He’s a grown-ass man. He’s got a kid of his own. And his last job had put him in contact with every sort of human filth in the business; he’s seen the creeps who go after the younger girls at the clubs. He’s out of that game now. Done. Straight edge.

This little fucker, though. Cruising in with his noisy friend and standing there with his hands in his pockets looking around Untouchable like this is the third gun shop he’s visited today and not even the best, all untucked shirt and hipster glasses and flickering smile. Iwai sells him a couple replica blades and pistols and figures that’s the last he’ll ever see of him. He’ll fuck around with his friends a little and then lose interest, like most kids he gets in here.

Instead he’s back the following week, carrying that cat with the eerily sentient blue eyes, leaning on the counter and telling him with a feverish glow that he’s an enthusiast. 

Iwai should have just banned him there and then. That’s another one of his rules. He doesn’t date kids, and he doesn’t go looking for trouble.

Instead Iwai starts expecting him. Every few weeks he shows up at the door, like a cable bill. Coming in to unload a bunch of old stuff and buy up the new stock. Iwai has no idea where he gets the cash or why he needs so many fake swords. And the stuff he brings—

“Where do you get this shit?” he asks him, when he puts a fucking _morningstar_ on the counter.

He shrugs. “Found it.”

Their relationship is going to stay strictly professional, of course. That’s what Iwai tells himself, until the little brat starts to _push_.

It isn’t really his fault. Iwai shows his ass with that favor he asks for, but the detectives have him up against a wall, and he isn’t as good under pressure as he used to be. Middle age is getting to him. Or maybe he’s just out of practice with almost getting killed.

Anyway. Iwai tells Akira not to look in the bag, he looks in the bag. He’s got guts, this kid. Gotta give him that much.

And he’s got a mouth on him. And a little blooming smirk that lights him up all the way to his eyes, cutting apart the blasé mask like a curtain pulled back from a stage. Iwai tries to keep his mind on the job. That’s good advice no matter what business you’re in. He gives him busy work in the shop, dusting and filing and unpacking new stock. And the occasional side job.

He’s a good worker—quick, efficient, eager to pick up new skills. Surprisingly good company, ready to take orders and not ask questions, until he does. He pushes and it pisses Iwai off, but it also turns him on.

Iwai could have just left it there, though. If it hadn’t been for the dress.

It’s not so much that boys in skirts does it for him. It does, but so do a lot of things. It’s just another piece in the 3-D model puzzle that is Akira Kurusu. Buys tons of fake weapons, carries around a cat in his school bag, smiles like a laser-cut. Befriends ex yakuza, works nights at gay bars, wears dresses.

Iwai does a little research.

Akira has a criminal record, which is less of a surprise than it should be. Apparently he accosted some guy and his girlfriend on the street, completely unprovoked. Sounds bogus to Iwai, but nobody asked him. 

He also attends Shujin Academy, the first place one of those Phantom Thieves calling cards showed up. Iwai isn’t deep in popular culture, but even he’s heard of them. Kaoru’s a fan, and as much as Iwai doesn’t love him idolizing vigilantes, it seems like these so-called defenders of justice only go after abusers, white-collar criminals, and idiot upstarts like Kaneshiro. It takes a real piece of work to grift high school kids. 

Iwai looks back through his account logs and finds the first transaction Akira ever made. About three weeks before that pervert gym coach resigned. But what does that actually mean? A high school kid starts buying fake weapons shortly before a vigilante group begins mysteriously forcing criminals to repent? That’s barely a notable coincidence, let alone evidence.

If anything, Akira himself is more of a smoking gun.

The quiet confidence that no one his age should have, the moments of unexpected proficiencies. When Iwai was 17 he was a disaster, brash and loud and self-centered, every move calculated to cover up how afraid he was of everything. The world was out to get him, so he was going to get the world first.

Also Akira sells Iwai the weirdest shit. It bares repeating. Bits of broken armor, empty picture frames, combination locks, scrap computer parts. Iwai buys stuff that has absolutely no resale value, if only to see what the kid brings him next. Where does a high schooler get stuff like this? It’s like he plucked it out of thin air.

And there’s the times he’s seen him skulking outside the shop after hours. Always at the intersection of the same two alleys, always for only a few minutes at a time. Iwai can’t call to mind any specific instances, and he can’t remember what Akira does when he’s there. Searching for the memory is like trying to pick up a coin lying flat on a counter—his fingers are too big and clumsy to catch hold. Actually, now that he ponders it, it might not even be Akira at all.

But whether he’s an infamous criminal or not, Iwai sends him a dress. A calling card of his own. Lala helps him pick it out, and although she doesn’t say anything outright, Iwai can tells she knows who it’s for. She doesn’t tell him not to do it, just says, “Don’t get in over your head, Mune-kun,” like they’re sixteen again and sharing a cigarette behind the school.

“Never,” Iwai promises, and her nostrils flare. She can smell the bullshit on him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so glad y'all are as thirsty for Gun Man as I am. Thank you for all the comments and kudos. 
> 
> This chapter is Akira POV, and I'm probs gonna be alternating back and forth, but like I said. No hard and fast plan. 
> 
> I've made a twitter @spine_and_spite 'cause i heard the iwai fandom there is lit as fuck. hit me up.

“Wow,” Ann says, when Akira pulls the dress out of the back of his closet. “If I could whistle, I’d be doing it. This is a _really_ famous label. And it’s gorgeous.” She holds it up to a dusty bar of sunlight. It shimmers in layers of red, like a geode. “It must have been crazy expensive.” 

“Do you really think he paid for it, though?” Yusuke muses without looking up from his sketchbook. Akira had almost forgotten he was here. For such a long-limbed, flamboyant presence, he can utterly disappear when he starts to draw. “He is a yakuza, after all.” 

“He deals arms, not ball gowns,” Morgana says, stretching his back legs, then his front. Yusuke frowns as he unsettles his pose. He’s been drawing a series he calls “the wistful intelligence of the black cat”, the title doubtlessly a nod to Morgana’s vanity. 

“Still,” Yusuke says, smudging charcoal with the back of his hand. 

“He’s an ex yakuza,” Morgana adds, settling back down. “Are you gonna wear it?” he asks Akira. 

Akira shrugs. 

“Are you gonna go out with him?” 

“He hasn’t asked me out,” Akira says. Just sort of threatened him while also offering him a backhanded compliment. And a very expensive gift. 

“So are you gonna model it for us, or what?” Futaba looks up from her laptop. 

Akira blinks. “You...want me to try it on?” 

“Duh! Why else would I be here?” 

“Because you’re nosey?” chirps Morgana. 

“Hey!” Futaba flicks a potato chip his way. “You’re the nosiest! You’re basically Akira’s stalker! Are you planning on going on their dates with them?” 

Privately, Akira doesn’t think Futaba has much of a leg to stand on when it comes to eavesdropping, since he’s almost positive she found out about the dress because she’s still got his phone bugged. He’s glad he’s not the sort to do much sexting. 

_Need you tonight_. 

He shivers. 

Yusuke has gone a bit misty-eyed, his art brain cranked up to eleven, half-finished sketch of Morgana lying abandoned on the table. “That would be...something to behold. Two sides of Akira, yin and yang, the perfect balance of masculine and feminine, suggesting the subtlest hint of a deeper dual nature--.” 

“You mean, like, bisexual?” Ann cocks her head. 

Yusuke’s cheeks go a delicate rose. “I meant his identity as Joker, but that might add to the theme as well…” 

Futaba rolls her eyes. “Too many themes, Inari! Calm down!” 

“You don’t have to try it on if you don’t want to,” Ann says. 

Akira suppresses a smile. “Thanks, Ann.” 

If any of them find the dress thing weird, they haven’t said anything. But he thinks that all of the Phantom Thieves instinctually understand, though they have different ways of filtering the metaverse through their blood when they’re not inside it. None of them feel right, feel whole, without it. And Morgana doesn’t feel right no matter where he is. 

Akira does try the dress on, but not until everyone clears out. Not on purpose, really. They just get distracted by Futaba reading phansite comments out loud, ranging from pleas to be included, marriage proposals, and ridiculous speculations on how the heists are carried out. Of course, the truth is more ridiculous than any theory, and no one even gets close. The consensus still seems to be some very elaborate form of blackmail. There have to be other people out there who have access to the metaverse, but so far no one has even mentioned it. 

Ann and Yusuke head for the station, Futaba goes downstairs to sit with Sojiro while he starts dinner, and Morgana goes out to do...whatever Morgana does at night. Cat things, Akira thinks. Stuff he’s embarrassed to do when humans are watching. Once he’d caught him cleaning his face with one delicate paw, and he’d reacted like Akira had walked in on him naked. 

Akira stands in front of the mirror as the cooking smells begin to drift up through the floor. He can identify the stages of the process as different ingredients are added--onions, garlic, curry paste. He looks around the slowly darkening room, at the knickknacks on the shelves, the dusty curtains, the ancient TV so heavy he’d pulled a muscle dragging it up here. He hears Futaba’s delighted shout of laughter, the lower rumble of Sojiro’s answering chuckle. Somehow, over last few months of his exile, Akira’s become the happiest he’s ever been. 

And Iwai’s prediction had been right. This dress does suit him better than Ann’s did. He doesn’t know what he finds more disconcerting, the fact that Iwai had spent money on him, or that he’d been watching him closely enough to know his dress size. 

In the metaverse, he is aware of his body in a way he’s never been before, learning its rhythms and quirks and vulnerabilities. His cognitive body is capable of feats his physical never will be. Now, standing at the mirror looking at himself in something he’s not supposed to wear, not supposed to _want_ to wear, he has the same sort of hyper-awareness. His collarbones, wrists, the lines of his hips and waist. He feels them all keenly. 

He doesn’t pick up another shift at Untouchable or Crossroads for the next month or so--he’s distracted by midterms and a sudden flare up of colds in the ranks of the Phantom Thieves. Ryuji spends a mementos trip lumbering around like a zombie, and Futaba sounds like an 80-year old man over the phone. Morgana is afflicted by adorable little cat-sneezes. Then, of course, there’s the omnipresent threat of their newest member being sold off by her greedy psychopath of a father, or as Futaba calls him “Capitalism Dad”. 

So Akira hasn’t had much time to think about his aesthetic. Or the unshaven gunman twice his age that he has in no way had fantasies about pinning him against the stockroom wall after store hours. Or during store hours. Depends on the fantasy. The thing is, the stinging itch he gets under his skin that had pushed him to ask Ann to borrow a dress is mostly absent when he’s making regular trips to the metaverse. When he has frequent opportunities for fabulous bouts of violence, when he can let off some of the pressure built up inside him. He thinks that if he ever had a Palace of his own, that’s what it would be. A pressure chamber, a volcano minutes from eruption. A castle on a crumbling rock. 

One afternoon in early October, he gets an SMS from a number he doesn’t recognize. 

_I could use you at the bar tonight. 19:00-22:00, three hour shift. Your usual rate._

He’s not sure how Lala-chan got his info; probably from Ohya when she was too drunk to notice. 

He texts back _Is it a special occasion?_

_Could be, if you play your cards right._

_Oh, Lala-chan, are you hitting on me?_

_Don’t get cute, kid. Do you want the hours or not?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> writing scenes with more than three people in them are the bane of my existence.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love this Gay Yakuza Dad Who Is Trying His Best. 
> 
> Thank you guys so much for all the comments and kudos! And for coming to shout with me on twitter.

It’s been a long time since Iwai has thought about fairytales. Since before Kaoru could read for himself, and he picked that up quick. He’s always been a way more impressive child than Iwai ever was, in every way. 

Iwai doesn’t remember his parents ever reading to him when he was a kid--his dad was barely around and his mom worked two jobs--but his sister did. He remembers the slim little picture books from the public library, the flimsy crinkle of the cellophane covers. Iwai always preferred the large, heavy-bound books his sister brought home for herself, the ones she said were too grown up for him. He would run his hands over the spines and across the pages, as if he could absorb the words though his skin. 

His very favorite was an old book of myths, one that they must have actually owned, because he remembers it being a constant of his childhood. Either that or his sister just never returned it to the library. His favorite story was about a fox spirit that fell in love with a human girl from a village, which is weird as fuck, but no one ever questions those things in fairytales. The fox went to see a witch, who told him that if he wanted the girl to love him, he would have to begin acting like a human. Walking upright on two legs and eating at a table, wielding a sword and wearing clothes. 

Iwai can’t remember further than the premise. He can’t remember how it ends. When, years later, he goes looking for it to it read to Kaoru, he isn’t able to find it, not even after haltingly describing it to a children’s librarian and scouring the internet. He concludes that it must have just been a story his sister made up. He can’t remember its title because it just never had one. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t know how it ends--it just never ended. 

Akira looks effervescent in the dress. 

It’s not a word Iwai has ever heard spoken aloud, and he’s shaky on the exact definition. It just makes him think of shining things. Things too bright to look at. The dress suits Akira, and so does the word. 

Akira looks smaller here than he does in the shop. The dress clings in the way men’s clothes don’t, highlighting his waist and narrow hips, but it doesn’t make him look delicate. Or, no more delicate than a long and gleaming blade, or a snake, coiled and fluidly dangerous. 

And god, _this_ is why he’s been thinking about old fairytales, stories of ageless creatures of unfathomable allure. He is romanticizing this boy far more than he deserves, spinning tales in his head, justifications for why he can’t take his eyes off him. If he’s a spirit that has laid a spell, Iwai is helpless against him. Nothing to be done. Better that than the truth, that he’s just an old perv with the hots for a high school kid. 

Iwai snorts. When did he get this fucking pathetic?

Akira is talking with a businessman in a drooping tie when Iwai comes in, and from an outsider’s perspective, he seems politely interested in the conversation, but Iwai has spouted enough bullshit in his life to know when someone is faking a smile. Akira’s eyes flick toward Iwai, then away. He doesn’t make drinks; there’s probably some law against minors serving alcohol, and Lala likes to keep at least the glittery facade of a respectable establishment. Last time Iwai was here he’d been chopping limes. Mostly he just seems ornamental; an exotic bird, a jewel on a pillow. Pretty and tempting and untouchable. 

Seems to be working. The bar is more crowded than Iwai’s seen it in years. 

It’s ridiculous to pretend he isn’t here for Akira, but when Lala sweeps swoops down in a lavish confection of silk and fake pearls, wreathed in cigarette smoke, he realizes he’s going to do it anyway.

“Sake?” she asks. 

He nods, and she pulls a bottle from under the counter. Pricier than he usually goes for, but he doesn’t complain. Payment for services rendered. That’s fine. 

“Lucky you, showing up tonight,” she croons, pouring. 

“Yeah, lucky,” Iwai grunts. As if she hadn’t mentioned last week that he should think about coming by more often. “If I didn’t know better I would think you were trying to throw me at your seventeen year old bar hand.” 

Lala’s rings flash as she raises her cigarette to her mouth. “He’s coming down here for something. I’d rather he get it from you than someone else.” 

“Someone like who?” 

Lala raises painted brows. “Someone untrustworthy.” 

Iwai snorts and takes a larger gulp of sake than he means to, warmth mingling with the unexpected constriction in his chest. Lala’s words are a compliment, but also a warning. A prophecy. Lala’s seen Iwai at his best, but she’s also seen him at his worst. She lived it. 

“What do you know about him?” he asks before he can help it. He hasn’t eaten since breakfast and the sake is going to his head. 

“No more than you, probably. Had some trouble with the police when he was a kid, goes to that school with the pervert gym coach and the dead principal, and he can murder a pair of heels.” She takes a drag and shrugs. “Beyond that, figure it isn’t really my business.” 

She flicks a glance down the bar, and Iwai’s get pulled along for the ride. “He’s something, though.” Not quite a compliment. Just a statement. Iwai looks at the fluid shape of him in the dress, shimmering underneath the bar lights, and thinks he knows exactly what she means. He’s smiling, but it’s bland and pleasant, not at all the knife-cut he pulls out at Untouchable. 

Lala is watching him watch. She starts to speak, but is interrupted by two voices rising in argument on the other side of the room. The other patrons go quiet. This isn’t that sort of bar; the voice-raising kind. The arguers are two foreigners, one large and perspiring, forehead and temples gleaming wetly. The second is small and ferrety, nostrils flared like he’s smelled something he doesn’t like. They’re arguing in English, too fast for Iwai to parse. 

Lala rallies. Her shawl goes further up her shoulders, her cigarette goes into the ashtray. “Gentlemen, surely this could be worked out amicably?” 

Neither of them even look at her. 

“Your tabs are still open, so I would hate to throw you out, but I’ll do it.” 

“Shut the fuck up, motherfucker,” snaps one of the men, finally, in Japanese. 

A silvery-bright flicker, and these two are upgraded in Iwai’s estimation from rowdy tourists to potential threats. 

Lala’s still talking. She hasn’t seen the knife. Iwai shudders up from his stool. The room tilts and he reels against the bar, swearing. Too much goddamn skae. And he’s too far away, she doesn’t see the knife--”Lala, watch out--!” 

Iwai isn’t going to make it there in time. 

Akira does. 

Between one blink and the next Ferret is moving, blade inches from Lala’s gut, and then he’s sprawled back against a table, clutching his face. Blood paints a bright arc in the air, and for a moment it seems to hang there, a ponderous crimson bridge. 

Then the man is swearing, choking, and Akira is staring down at his swelling fingers, bemused. 

Iwai thinks of the fox in the story again, and doesn’t know why. Iwai doesn’t remember it punching anyone in the face. On second thought, it might not have been a fox at all. It might have been a raven. Or a cat. Something quick and bright-eyed and brutal. 

Akira looks straight at him, like he knows where his thoughts have gone. It’s gonna be a long time before Iwai gets that image out of his head. This boy in the dress he bought for him, blood on his hands, _smiling_.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please look at this fucking amazing [art](http://cosmopoo.tumblr.com/post/162366388670/was-inspired-by-spine-and-spite-s-venus-as-a-boy) of dress akira. i die.

The euphoria of the fight, of the hunt, flows up Akira’s spine and spreads sparkly acidic through his limbs. His persona can’t manifest here, but he can feel it. It thrashes at the inside of his skin. He looks down at the man with his bloody mess of a face, and he wants to finish it. Needs to. The instinct to attack when his opponent is vulnerable is almost too much to resist.

He sways forward.

“Stop smiling like that, Joker!” Morgana hisses from just behind him. “You look crazy!”

Akira blinks. He closes his mouth. He grips the edge of the bar.

Morgana’s voice—or, the plaintive meows that everyone else hears—breaks the stunned silence. Patrons scramble for the door. Someone is shouting. At least four people babble about calling the police.

Lala adjusts her shawl. Her eyes are white around the edges and her bosom heaves up and down a little faster than usual, but apart from that you’d never know she’d almost just been gutted. “Darling, why don’t you clock out early?” Her gaze flickers from Akira to Iwai, who is standing beside his toppled stool.

Iwai, who had showed up and just ignored Akira for the last hour.

“Mune-san,” Lala says. “Can you make sure he gets home safe?”

Iwai is looking at Akira like he is a game with rules he hasn’t figured out. He nods.

Which is how Akira winds up in the bar’s tiny restroom, attempting to shoulder off the dress.

“You’re gonna hurt yourself!” Morgana snaps after his sixth failed attempt to get hold of the zipper with his left hand.

Akira swears and leans on the sink. He’s shivering with unspent adrenaline and his middle and index fingers are swelling. He can’t move them.

He never feels like this after a Palace fight—hot and shivery-sick. Not even the times he’s dragged himself away to a safe room, up to his elbows in black blood. In the metaverse pain is just another sensation, and the monsters disintegrate when it’s over.

Fuck. He’d just _punched_ a guy out there. And the guy hadn’t even died. So why is he shaking?

“Hey.” Akira fumbles through the pockets of his jeans for his phone. “I can get into the metaverse from here, right?”

Morgana springs up onto the sink, claws squealing against the ceramic. “Yeah, but you shouldn’t.”

“Can I not heal physical wounds?”

“All the wounds you get there are physical, Joker! That’s what the app let’s you do, bring your physical body into the cognitive world!”

Akira swallows a sharp spike of temper. He knows Morgana doesn’t mean to come off as blusteringly pedantic as he does, but he doesn’t have the patience for it just now. “I mean _real-world_ injuries. Can I not heal them with my persona?”

“No, you could.” His tail lashes with agitation. “A little thing like that would barely take a dia spell. That’s not the issue. You can’t just go into the bathroom with two broken fingers and come out with none. You’re supposed to be acting normal! That’s not normal!”

Akira rubs his palms against his eyes. “Shit.”

“You’re usually so careful!”

“I know that, Morgana. Give me a break, okay?”

A tentative knock. “Hey. Cops are on their way. We gotta get out of here.”

Akira turns to Morgana. “Can you—?”

“Not unless you want me to bite it off!”

A frisson moves through Akira as he realizes the quickest solution. He opens the bathroom door. The emergency light wreaths Iwai in an aura of green. He’s wearing the same jacket as last time; maybe he only has the one casual outfit.

“Can you—.” Akira makes an ambiguous gesture toward his back. Iwai’s brows jab together. Akira breathes out hard as his fingers give a hot throb. “Can you unzip the dress? I can’t get it off.” He raises his swelling hand.

“Oh. Yeah. Turn around.”

Akira’s skin goes prickly-hot. He tries to breathe through this the same way he would a panic attack. His nerves feel jangled and twisted around. He flinches away from Iwai’s touch without meaning to, and Iwai makes a soft noise. Not sympathy, but not exactly censure either. He twitches Akira’s hair aside to bare the nape of his neck.  


Morgana is still standing on the sink. He doesn’t have eyebrows, but Akira swears they’re raised anyway.

The zip makes a smooth noise as it parts. It wasn’t very tight to begin with—Akira doesn’t have the chest to fill it out—but it still feels like a release. Like shedding skin.

“How do they feel?”

“My fingers? Bad.”

“Thanks, smartass. I mean, you think they’re broken?” He asks it the same way he might ask _you looking for anything new?_ or _you dust over here yet?_ Not like he’s unzipping a dress he bought for someone who just punched a guy out.

“Yeah, I think so.” Now just leave. Leave so I can fix it.

“You got someone to pick you up?”

“Huh?”

Akira realizes that Iwai must have heard him talking to Morgana, and assumed that he had been on the phone.

“Um, no—I’m just going to take the train.”

Iwai gets the zipper all the way down, and for a fleeting moment the heat of his hands rests on Akira’s lower back. Then he steps away. “I’m not letting you take the train all the way to Yongen with a broken hand.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine.”

“I’m—.”

“Kid, fucking listen to me. I know shock when I see it.” His face darkens, before he pushes the expression away. “Let me call someone. I know a doctor who won’t ask questions.”

Akira says, “So do I.”

-

Iwai calls him a cab. Akira doesn’t know the address of the clinic, but he describes the intersection. The driver is obviously exhausted and scowls through the whole exchange, but then he nods and puts the car in gear. Akira feels like he’s floating, head filled up with helium, so it takes him a moment to realize Iwai has climbed in after him.

“What are you doing?”

Iwai cocks a brow. “You got enough cash?”

Not on him. He doesn’t carry around the Phantom Thieves’ stash to go to part-time jobs. Akira relents, sagging against the window. “I’ll pay you back.”

On the bench seat between them, Akira’s bag rattles. Iwai’s gaze darts down for a moment, but Morgana stays quiet. He knows better than to make a fuss in a cab. Most of them don’t allow animals.

If Morgana could speak right now, Akira wonders what warnings he would give. To keep quiet, not draw attention. Let Iwai escort him home like a good kid. The sort who wouldn’t be out in the middle of the night with a lacy red dress folded up in his schoolbag. Or would he bring up the other side of this—the one Akira can’t stop playing through his head. Taxi rides and expensive clothes, Iwai towering over him in Untouchable’s back room, talking to him about a special menu with that smirking delight in his eyes.

Futaba had shrieked with laughter when Akira had told her about that. _“Oh my god, it’s like bad yaoi.”_

Lala had tapped her cigarette against the edge of a bottle and said, _“If you’re looking for a sugar daddy, he’s not a bad choice.”_

Well, Akira doesn’t need one of those. Whatever he wants from Iwai, it isn’t money. At least, not money he doesn’t earn. He doesn’t want expensive gifts and compliments and whatever else older lovers are supposed to do with the younger people they’re fucking.

What _does_ he want?

The guns, yeah, of course. But hypothetically they could find another fence. Maybe not one as willing to buy without asking questions, but they could find _something_. And Akira is attracted to Iwai, but he’s attracted a lot of people. He has a lot of good-looking friends.

As he always inevitably does when he starts to analyze his situation, Akira wonders why he is the one with this power, why he has the ability to manifest endless forms from out of his psyche, when the rest of the Thieves are confined to one. People always say that Akira is special, and when he’s tried to insist that, no, he’s pretty sure it’s because a long-nosed man and a pair of twins have hijacked his dreams, people just look at him like he’s crazy. Or like they can’t understand what he’s saying, but they know it isn’t anything important. Like he’s making small talk about train delays or the weather.

He figures it’s something like the cognitive dissonance that makes Morgana sound like a cat to anyone who hasn’t heard him in the metaverse. If you haven’t visited the Velvet Room, you can’t conceive of its existence.

He understands that the little jolts of connection he feels with his teammates, that he feels with Iwai, are at least partly the Velvet Room’s influence. This power he has—whatever it is—draws its strength from bonds, from affection and esteem. He gets stronger as people grow to trust him more. In fact, he can feel that power simmering under his skin now, sitting beside Iwai in the dim taxi, watching the patterns of the streetlights slide over his face. His head is tipped back against the seat, eyes shut in a rare lapse of his hyper-vigilance. Akira wonders if he’s fallen asleep, but then his throat works as he swallows, eyes flickering open to catch Akira staring. He jerks his gaze back to the window, and in the reflection he can see that Iwai is watching _him_ now, expression unreadable.

Akira’s fingers are really starting to hurt, throbs of bone-deep pain. He watches Iwai’s eyes in the window.

He wonders if, just maybe, Iwai has no idea what he wants from Akira either.

-

The cab leaves them on the curb. The doctor is in—Akira can see the light in her office. She’s told him before that she does her best work at night. When she opens the door, her eyes dart from Akira’s swollen hand, to Morgana’s head poking out of his bag, to Iwai looming behind him in the doorway.

“Rough night, Kurusu-kun?”

Akira dredges up a grin. “You have no idea.”

She sighs. “Go ahead into the exam room.” She opens the door just wide enough to let Akira in under her arm. Then she inserts herself between it and the jam. “Your friend can wait outside. There’s a vending machine at the end of the alley.”

Something tight and mean flickers over Iwai’s face, but he steps back. “Fine. I’ll be waiting, kid.”

Akira’s guts do something squirmy, and he nods.

Takemi closes the door and crosses her arms. She’s barefoot. It’s weird to see her without heels. She’s shorter than he realized. “Are you in some sort of trouble?” 

Akira laughs, because good god is that a many-layered question. He holds up his injured hand. “Lots. But this is the only kind I need you to fix.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey y'all thank you so much for the comments. I've been recovering from surgery so I haven't responded to them all, but I appreciate each and every one of them.

The vending machine at the end of the street flashes a “sold out” screen in spasmodic flickers. The outside is coated in a layer of grime; it probably hasn’t been filled up in years. This is Tokyo, so he could walk half a block and probably find another, but Iwai isn’t particularly thirsty. 

He hooks his fingers into the chain-link fence separating the alley from the street and breathes in deep. The air tastes like incoming rain, the night chillier than any yet this year. Iwai twists his grip tighter on the fence. Fall weather always makes him want a cigarette. 

His phone informs him that he has three missed calls from distributors, one dull and threatening voicemail from Tsuda, and three texts from Kaoru. They are time-stamped from four hours ago, and the last one reads _r u coming home tonight?_

He sighs and slides his phone back into his pocket. No use responding now; Kaoru will be asleep. It’s a school night. Akira should be asleep, fuck, not getting patched up by a back alley doctor at two o’clock in the morning after busting his fingers on a gangster’s face. 

A car passes in a long sigh of tires on wet asphalt. Iwai pictures Akira’s face when he’d climbed into the cab after him. Disbelieving and a little bit trapped. Just how long has it been since this kid has had anyone he could rely on to take care of him? Iwai might be a thug, but he doesn’t like to watch people get hurt. Especially people who don’t deserve it. He’d saved Iwai’s oldest friend from what could very well have been a fatal stab wound. And he’s helped him out before then. If anything, he’s earned Iwai’s respect. 

_Yeah, that’s what you feel for him. Respect._

He closes his eyes and pictures the gleam in Akira’s eyes as held up a bloody fist, fingers already beginning to swell. Iwai had been half convinced he was a hallucination; that was how closely this Akira resembled the Akira haunting his thoughts, the fell creature of myth with the razorblade smile. He really thought Akira was going to attack that man while he was bleeding on the ground, just launch himself over the bar and go for his throat. 

The woman in the clinic had sized Iwai up with suspicious eyes. _I’m not the one you should be worrying about_ , he couldn’t help thinking, as Akira ducked under her arm. But of course, she knows him. Probably better than Iwai does. Maybe he gets into a lot of fights--why else would you be on friendly terms with back-alley doctors who do their work in the dead of night? And then there’s all the weapons. Fake weapons. 

A few months ago, Iwai had considered and then promptly discarded the possibility that Akira could be in an organization There are youth groups in the city, no doubt--Iwai had been in one of them--but it doesn’t track. It doesn’t feel right. He knows how freshly recruited kids act, and this isn’t it. 

“Fuck.” He smacks a hand against the fence, letting it rattle out his frustration. 

Night in Tokyo isn’t dark--there is too much ambient light, too much life--but that doesn’t mean it isn’t threatening. Iwai used to routinely spend the day sleeping and the nights working--Yakuza business is typically the sort that takes place after sundown--and no matter how well-rested he was, how much caffeine he had singing through his veins, he always felt somewhat off. Night owl or not, there is something deep in the psyche of the human animal that knows that darkness does not belong to you. It’s for smaller, crawling things.Things that creep. 

So when the creature looms from the darkness, backlit by the security light, writhing and misshapen, Iwai isn’t surprised. Just gripped by a shockingly acute pulse of fear. He falls backward against the fence. He cowers. 

Then the shape bends down, and one becomes two. A cat trots on noiseless paws and Akira stands up straight. “Sorry to keep you waiting.” 

The spell is broken. Iwai takes a rattling breath. This has been a weird as fuck night. 

Akira is wearing an overlarge sweatshirt that he must have borrowed from the doctor. A white adhesive bandage blurs the line of his chin. Iwai had seen the blood on his face when they’d been in the taxi, but he figured it was spatter, not a wound. The man hadn’t gotten close enough to cut him. 

“You get lonely out here?” Akira smiles. The half hour inside the clinic has given him back his balance, repainted the mirror-smooth finish. The boy who had snarled across the bar, and the one who’d blushed and asked Iwai to unzip his dress, trembling at a soft hand on the nape of his neck--they are both nowhere to be found. 

“She fix you up?” 

Akira’s fingers are splinted neatly and wrapped in medical tape. “She said I’ll probably need to go to a real hospital tomorrow. Fingers are difficult to keep isolated enough to heal without some sort of hard cast.” 

Iwai knows this from practical experience, but he just says, “You okay to get home?” 

Akira pulls a key out on a Shujin lanyard. Then he sways backward, as if poised for flight. “I think I can handle it,” he says, and turns on his heel. 

On the concrete, the blue-eyed cat shakes puddle water off one paw. It follows Akira around the corner, but not before giving Iwai a look that seems to say, “You coming or not?” 

\--

Cafe Leblanc is small, just three booths and a counter. It smells strongly, but not unpleasantly, of turmeric. Two heavy-bottomed glass beakers sit in wooden frames on the bar--mad scientist paraphernalia, most likely for brewing coffee. To Iwai, coffee comes from a mysterious machine at the Family Mart on the corner, or out of little cellophane BlendyStick packets.

Akira lives in an attic apartment on the second floor, because he isn’t enough of a manga character already. He has to live alone above a cafe. He pulls his sweatshirt off and tosses it onto a booth as soon as he gets in the door. “Make yourself at home,” he says, like this is his living room, which Iwai supposes it is. “I’m making coffee.” 

“Wouldn’t tea be more reasonable at this time of night?” It’s an incredibly old man thing to say, but Iwai can’t go all night anymore. In any sense of the phrase. 

In response Akira turns on the coffee grinder. When he shuts it off he says, “We don’t have tea at Leblanc. The owner would throw you out for suggesting it.” 

The kid’s got a poker face like bulletproof glass and Iwai can’t tell if he’s kidding. 

“You work here too?” He sits down on one of the stools, uncomfortably aware of how similar this is to their first meeting at Crossroads. But standing around is awkward as hell. Akira hasn’t turned on the cafe’s house lights, just the dim ones above the glass-fronted cabinets. The cat (does it have a name? He should find out its name) hops up beside the filter.

“I have a lot irons in the fire,” Akira says, and adjusts his glasses with a comedic quirk of his mouth. 

“Yeah, no kidding.” Iwai watches him tip boiling water from a long-stemmed kettle, turning the grounds into a boggy mess. At once coffee begins to trickle down into the carafe below. “When I was your age, well--I was just a petty thief at that point.” 

For some reason, Akira’s smile widens. He looks up at Iwai prettily from under long lashes. 

Iwai scratches at his chin, unbalanced. “Heard you got done for assault.” 

“Heard?” Akira adds more water. The steams fogs his glasses and the deep smell of coffee fills the cafe, bright and disorienting. Coffee is a morning smell. “From who?” 

“You aren’t the only one with friends in low places, kid.” He’s got more than he cares for. “And if you’re really trying to go straight-edge, I might point out the thousands of yen worth of jewelry and mismatched garbage you’ve unloaded on me since last year.”

“What about it?” 

“I doubt you inherited it.” 

Another smile. “Maybe Ryuji just has a whole bunch of very rich, very silly, very dead great aunts.” 

“Ryuji. He’s the noisy yellow one, ain’t he?” 

The cat makes a little sneezing hiss, followed by a long, rowling purr. Akira’s mouth twitches. “Don’t say that when he’s not here to defend himself.” 

“What, that he’s noisy?” 

Akira continues to stare at the cat, who stares back. Then he puts the kettle down. “Yeah.” He flicks his hair out of his eyes. The cat hops down off the counter and slinks toward the stairs, glancing back before it disappears like a passing shadow. 

Iwai knows he missed something of significance there. That somehow the eerie sentience of the cat’s gaze is echoed back in the way Akira treats him like he is a third member of their conversation. How he lets him out into the back alley at Untouchable before every shift, and scoops him back up at the end without fail. But Iwai is distracted by the curls at Akira’s temples, gone limp and silken from the steam. His smile is lazy, his eyes soft. Actually, it sort of looks like--. 

“Kid, are you high?” 

Akira watches the coffee drip. “Hmm? Oh, a little. Am I being weird?” 

“No weirder than usual.” Weird isn’t the word for it. He’s more sensual and cat-like than ever. Or maybe it’s Iwai, the vision of Akira in that dress with blood on his fingers recurring like an acid flashback.

“Tae-san gave me something when she splinted my fingers. She said otherwise I’d wriggle around too much.” 

Painkillers. Right. “What did you take?” 

He shrugs. “I didn’t ask. The bottle wasn’t labeled.” 

Iwai takes the steaming cup. The smell is already making him feel more awake. “You trust her that much?” 

Akira pours for himself. “Yes.” 

“Seems a little shady.” 

Akira raises one eyebrow. Iwai has never been able to do that and he’s always resented it. “I’m an excellent judge of character.” 

Iwai tries his coffee. 

“Holy shit.” He burns the roof of his mouth but he barely cares. “This is fantastic.” 

Akira sets the pot down. He’s glowing with satisfaction. “I know.” 

_Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back._

Iwai’s neck prickles, sensation rolling in a slow tidal wave down his spine and into his guts. He likes this, he realizes with dawning horror. He likes being here in this bougie coffee shop in the middle of the night, likes this smirking, adroitly feral boy. Akira is cute as fuck, but it’s worse than that. He enjoys his company, which is more dangerous than just appreciating his pretty mouth or slender wrists. Infatuation is so much easier to deal with than genuine esteem. 

To distract himself, he asks, “You ever punch anyone before?” 

Akira takes slow sips of his coffee, rubbing his lips against the rim of the cup. Maybe he is higher than he looks. He tips his head to the side. “No,” he says. He sounds bemused. “Maybe you could teach me.” 

Iwai laughs, a soft huff out his nose. “You sure know what you want, huh.” 

Akira takes his glasses off, rubbing his eyes, wincing when it jars his splinted fingers. He switches to his left. “I wish I did.” 

“Hmm?” Iwai hadn’t expected him to respond. It had barely been a question. 

Akira swirls his coffee, never quite far enough to spill. Contained chaos. Just like him. “It doesn’t feel like I know what I want. Or like it matters.” 

Iwai doesn’t know what to say, so he doesn’t say anything.  
Akira watches the slow whirlpool in his cup. “I don’t really make my choices. They kind of make me. I never...really decided to do any of it.” His words have a soft, pulsing cadence to them, and Iwai is acutely aware that he would not be hearing any of this if Akira was sober. To listen is shitty, but to dismiss him would be cruel. 

“Nobody ever really feels like they chose their fate, kid. When the big stuff happens, you react the way you do because of what you’ve made yourself into.” 

Akira frowns. 

“Agh. Sorry, that was vague as hell.” Iwai isn’t insightful. At least, not out loud. Connections creep in at the corners of his consciousness sometimes, but he has no gift in expressing them. His stomach does nervous backflips. “I mean...you go around all day and make little choices. Whether or not to tell a lie or cut in line or be a dick to your friends. So you make yourself, right? Design yourself.” 

Akira is staring at the counter, mouth twisted in concentration. At least he isn’t laughing yet. 

“So then when you gotta do the big stuff--say, when you see a lady being harassed on the street by some prick, you knock him on his ass like he deserves.” 

That makes Akira smile--the quicksilver flash that Iwai is beginning to realize is a sign of discomfort. “And ruin my whole life in the process.” 

It’s the only time he has ever talked about his past. Iwai has spilled his guts out to Akira on more than one occasion. But Akira never talks about himself. 

“I don’t know. Your life doesn’t seem too ruined to me.” He gestures around the cafe. “I mean, yea, it blows you had to leave your hometown and live somewhere without a goddamn shower, but would you rather be the kind of person who just watches bad shit happen and walks away? I know that’s rich coming from a gangster, but what I did doesn’t change the fact that there’s a right and a wrong.” Somehow this conversation has gone from vague to shockingly personal. He wonders if he should apologize. “Most of my choices have been garbage. You know me well enough to realize that by now.” 

Akira shakes his head. Then he makes an aborted motion across the counter, a little sway forward. Iwai tenses, unsure of what he means to do. Kiss him? Attack? 

“I admire you,” he tells Iwai from a few inches away. “You’re…” He laughs, a breathy chuckle that warms Iwai to his extremities. He’s in trouble, fuck, is he in trouble. 

“You might not be a good person, but--I trust you.” Akira presses a hand to his sternum, the space between his heart and guts. “Morgana trusts you, and that says a lot.” 

“Who now?” 

“Oh.” Akira’s eyes widen. “Um. The cat. Shit.” He rubs a hand over his face. “I feel like I’m dreaming.” 

“Your cat likes me?” Iwai pauses. “Your cat named Morgana?” 

Akira’s eyes are huge, dilated from the drugs and the dark. Iwai realizes, with a sinking feeling, that if the counter hadn’t been between them he’d reach forward and wrap a hand around the back of Akira’s neck to draw him in. Taste that soft pink mouth, suck the coffee off his bottom lip. 

He stands up abruptly. “Glad you’re okay. I’m gonna miss the last train, so--.” 

Without looking at the time Akira says, “You already have.” 

“I’ll get a cab, then.” 

“Or you can stay.” Another smile. Iwai refuses to believe he doesn’t know what he’s implying. “I’ve got a couch.” 

“I, uh--.” Iwai can barely squeeze the words out around the echo of his heartbeat. “I gotta be home for Kaoru in the morning.” 

He doesn’t. Kaoru is more than capable of getting to school on his own. He does it most mornings. But Iwai uses it to steady himself. A reminder that he’s a grown man with a life and a kid and a hundred reasons he shouldn’t stay the night with a manic pixie dream boy. 

It seems to steady Akira too. He gathers the used coffee cups toward him. “Okay. See you, I guess.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun fact i wrote the cafe scene while I was on painkillers, so I hope High Akira is fairly accurate lmao


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> agghhh thank you all so much for the kind comments and the great art! I'm so glad you guys share my thirst.

When Akira finally staggers up to bed it’s nearing three in the morning and he has edged from exhausted all the way round to dizzyingly energized. Caffeine doesn’t usually affect him like this, though it may have reacted to whatever Takemi had given him. He is jittery and astoundingly high. 

“Don’t you dare,” Morgana says when Akira moves for the desk. He is a small, hunched patch of darkness on the bookshelf, his eyes the only points of light in the room. “You’re going to bed, young man.” 

Akira falls backward onto his futon, fully-clothed, the frame giving an alarming grunt under his weight. “You’re not my real dad.” 

“That’s lucky, ‘cause then you might start flirting with me.” 

This spins around Akira’s head for a couple seconds before it really penetrates. “Wait, _what_?” 

“You.” Morgana’s paws are a light tap tap tap across the floor. “Flirting with dads.” 

“Oh, you mean--well, he’s not my dad. I don’t flirt with my own dad, Jesus Christ. If there was a moratorium against flirting with dads, how would any dad ever get laid ever?” 

Morgana springs up onto the bed, settling in his usual corner. “Wow, you really are being weird.” 

Akira blinks at him, eyes adjusting to the dark. The attic’s windows look out onto a bare back alley; the night is shockingly dark. It reminds Akira, sometimes uncomfortably, of home. “I’m on painkillers.” 

Morgana rolls onto his back, kicking his legs up into the air. “Can’t relate.” He cocks his head, paws crooked. Akira wants to take a video and put it on the internet. He wants to scratch Morgana’s ears and bury his face in his fur, rub the little white spot at the back of his neck/ Morgana hates being treated like a cat, but still he triggers whatever built-in response humans have to want to cuddle small, squirmy creatures. 

“Did you really mean that?” Morgana says. “The getting laid thing--I mean, are you interested in Iwai-san like that?” 

Akira works his shirt off over his head and unbuttons his jeans. “You’re the one who said he wants to be my boyfriend.” 

“Yeah, but I was joking! Well, at least 80% joking.” 

Akira arches his back, lifting his hips up off the futon to work his pants down. He could get up and get them off more easily, but to his doped-up brain that feels like cheating. Eventually he succeeds. Morgana is watching him with exaggerated patience. 

“This is hard with one hand, okay?” 

“Mm hmm.” 

Akira grins. “Maybe I should have asked Iwai to take my pants off before he left.” 

Morgana rolls his eyes. “Yea, that would have gone over well.” He tucks his chin down, curling up into a loose little loaf of cat. He starts to purr. The sound is now one of the most familiar things in Akira’s life. He wonders what will happen if Morgana ever succeeds in turning himself back into a human. Would he still want to sleep curled up on the end of Akira’s bed? He might have a little more trouble explaining that one to Sojiro. 

Then again, he’d have a really hard time explaining a stubbly ex-yakuza coming down from his attic in the morning. It’s probably best for everyone that Iwai had decided to leave. But Akira’s brain is floating in a bizarrely soft and malleable space where consequences seem a thousand miles away, and he still can’t brush away the soft memory of Iwai’s fingers on his back as he’d eased down the zipper. 

Morgana had joked (80% joked, apparently) about Iwai wanting to be Akira’s boyfriend, but he actually has no idea what Iwai wants. With all of Akira’s other bonds, the relationship feels transactional--he solves their problems, helps them self-actualize by saying the right thing at the right time, and their esteem and admiration fuels his power in the metaverse. A slightly sociopathic way to view friendships, but Akira only has so many choices here. He needs to be stronger. Faster. He needs to keep his promises to his team. 

He hasn’t thought much about Iwai beyond fevered fantasies of being ravished in the back room of Untouchable, Iwai’s hands pinning his wrists to the walls. He’s imagined Iwai’s rough voice breaking on Akira’s name when he sucks his dick, because in his fantasies he is miraculously amazing at it, even though he’s never done it before. None of his daydreams have extended beyond this--what it would be like to actually date Iwai. Would they go to movies? Dinner? Hold hands? Akira isn’t super clear on how _traditional_ relationships work, let alone cross-generational, same-sex ones. 

Forgetting how standing up is cheating, Akira rolls off the bed and grabs for his jeans, smearing sweaty fingers on his phone screen. He’s gone a little clammy, probably from the interaction of substances in his body. He’d wanted to go into the metaverse right when Iwai left, but Morgana hadn’t wanted him to take the risk. Even though Leblanc isn’t a Palace, there could be stray shadows around. So he’ll have to live with his broken fingers for one more night. 

He brings up the app, the angry red and black eye that seems to cast its pal over his entire life. His stomach contracts uncomfortably as he types “Munehisa Iwai” into the locator. The little search icon spins. 

“ _No matches found_ ,” announces the automated voice. “ _Data does not exist_.” 

Akira releases his breath. 

“...‘Kira?” Morgana mumbles a sleepy question. 

“Nothing,” Akira says. “Go back to sleep.” 

So Iwai doesn’t have a Palace. That’s...not really a surprise. Dark past or not, he doesn’t seem to have any distorted desires. At least not beyond the usual sort. Akira is pretty sure you have to cause a lot of damage to a lot of people before your cognition forms itself into a tangible space. And he doubts the Velvet Room would have chosen someone like that for him to form a bond with in the first place. 

As if in response to his thoughts, as soon as he lays back down the first soft stirrings start at the corner of his mind, brushing plush and enveloping over him. He doesn’t always remember his trips to the Velvet Room, but he always knows when they begin. It doesn’t feel like falling asleep.

Igor is waiting for him with his customary polite interest, Justine with her blank professionalism, and Caroline with her usual, “About time, inmate! Just because you stay up all night doesn’t mean we’ll let you off!” Lately she doesn’t do much more than feign hostility. Akira is turning into quite the success story, and even if they are simply hauntings of his own fractured psyche, they are pleased with him. 

“Your list of confidantes appears to be lengthening, expanding, and deepening.” There’s nothing inherently dirty about Igor’s intonation, but this is inside Akira’s head, so he knows exactly what he means. 

“I just listened to my cat nag me about this for an hour,” Akira says, wrapping his hands around the cold prison bars. “Don’t you start.” 

“On the contrary.” Igor folds his hands on his desk. “Physical bonds can deepen emotional ones.” 

“So this is you giving me your blessing?” A disturbing thought, that his subconscious mind is giving him permission to bone a man more than twice his age. 

Igor just smiles. The room gently dissolves into the sway of Akira’s dreams. 

\--

Over the next few weeks, Iwai manages not to think about Akira Kurusu. Well. He doesn’t think about him _much_. Certainly not _all the time_. Just...a normal amount. Tsuda shows up with more cheesy demands. He sounds like a loan shark from 1940’s Hollywood, and he doesn’t give a shit, because he’s got Iwai by the balls. He doesn’t dare tell Tsuda to go fuck himself, although he longs to a with a fervency verging on the fetishistic. 

The drop-off happens in the park as usual, but without his wigman, Iwai feels exposed, weirdly vulnerable. Akira’s presence settles his nerves, but he doesn’t want to bother him while he’s got busted fingers. And one criminal enterprise a week is enough for a kid on probation. Iwai has to keep reminding himself that his own adolescence isn’t the norm. 

Meanwhile, the Phantom Thieves continue to be all anyone wants to talk about. Iwai has never had much patience for cable news or talk radio--it’s all just spin, politicians jerking off into the public’s faces and claiming they should be grateful for it. At first it just seems like an attempt to promote that new idol--that detective prince--but now people mostly have decided he’s an idiot. Kaoru hates his guts. 

Iwai mostly just ignores the Phantom Thieves hype. Until one drizzly evening in Shibuya station, when he can’t anymore. 

He’s...not actually sure why he’d come out here, if he’s honest. He’s just walking, lollipop stuck in the corner of his mouth, jonesing for a cigarette. He’d quit years ago, but it’s almost like resisting one temptation has caused all the other ones to flare up. He’s striding through the station, just letting his feet pull him along. It’s only when he feels the draft of a train passing that he realizes he’d gone through the Tokyo Subway gate. He doesn’t even have his Suica with him. 

God, he’s been so busy thinking about crimes that he went and did a crime without realizing it. 

He’s got a foot on the platform steps, when he hears a laugh that sends a familiar skitter across his nerves. An express train passes through without stopping, a flash of lighted windows and bowed heads, and when it’s gone he’s there, in jeans and a school jacket, head tipped back as he laughs. It’s wild and bright, totally unselfconscious. He has never laughed that way in front of Iwai, and his stomach gives a jealous clench as he sees the slouchy blond with the big mouth leaning on Akira’s shoulder. 

He’s not the only one with Akira--there’s a whole herd of them. A pretty foreign girl with pigtails and red tights, a slender boy in a shabby pinstriped blazer he could have borrowed from his grandfather. A redhead with her face in her phone, another girl with a neat coat and gloves, and one with fluffy hair and lively eyes. They are spread out across the platform, aglow with purpose. 

They aren’t waiting for a train. They’re walking like they have a destination in mind and no time to waste. Iwai knows this station like a second home--there’s nothing at the far end of the platform but a service tunnel and row of vending machines that only sell off-brand sports drinks. Stations are popular spots for kids to hang out, maybe pass around a six-pack swiped from a convenience store, but not one as well-lit and traveled as Shibuya, and not this early in the evening. Rush hour is barely over. 

Casually, hands in his pockets, Iwai matches their steps. No reason, really. It’s just interesting to catch Akira unawares, in his natural habitat. He looks...different. Even at a distance, knowing nothing about them except where they go to school, Iwai can tell he’s their leader. It’s in the way they angle their bodies, the way they check in to see his reactions, to see what he thinks of their ideas. They move in a tight little group, dripping with a confidence he hasn’t seen in--

The air ripples.

Or more like, _everything_ ripples. Trains, tracks, tiled floor. A red haze seeps across his vision, and suddenly Iwai’s body is heavy, like he’s wearing one of those lead-lined smocks they drape you in for x-rays, and he feels sick. It’s not exactly nausea, or nausea as he has ever experienced it before. It isn’t localized to his stomach. His whole body tingles with the bizarre _wrongness_ of the world around him. 

Across the the platform, the kids vanish one by one down an escalator that doesn’t exist. 

Iwai hesitates three heartbeats. Four. Five. Then he follows.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yo hit me up on tumblr and spine-and-spite or twitter at spine_and_spite.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> y'all are great I'm feeling the love.

Different people call it different things, depending on whose side they’re on and whether they are trying to be kind. The _event_ , the _incident_ , the _attack_. To Akira it had simply been a thrumming moment of freefall, the blunt force of connection as he’d grabbed and shoved. A pair of rage-bruised eyes that crashed a line of dominos into his guts. Right then he’d known--he’d done something in one breathless snap of decision that he would drag behind him for the rest of his life. 

He experiences the same harrowing when he stands with Ryuji on the sidewalk and watches the castle loom up in front of them--except it’s deeper, visceral. And instead of dragging him down into the murk it raises him him up, cradles him in its waves of thick, dangerous power. Arsene rattles in the cage of his ribs, whispering to him as they wander the halls of that first disgusting Palace, until finally he froths out of every pore, years of shivery tension building up into an explosion. Potential energy turned into motion. 

He has never asked the others if it’s the same for them, that sensuous build of electricity along their spines. He expects they all feel it differently, the way some scientists believe we all see colors differently. But they can still be here with him. 

“The enemy is weak to ice!” Oracle’s shout hums through more than just their ears; she lights up the pathways in their brains, telling them where to go and what to do. They scatter to give Fox space, to cry his persona’s name and send crystalline missiles bursting into the shadows--two lion-sized creatures with manes of fire. The third shadow, a huge ragged bird that reeks of carrion, dodges up and out of the way. Fox swears colorfully. 

“Fox!” 

Joker holds out a hand, because he can do this, knows it with the thrill of battle in his veins. Power crackles up through him as Fox touches his hand, passing off the flow of the fight and inside the touch he can feel how they are connected. Yusuke’s frustration and passion, his admiration of Akira and all the rest of the Phantom Thieves. He can feel how Fox is different here--less prickly and reserved, wilder. A force to be reckoned with. 

After the incident, it became very important that Akira control himself. That was one of the first things his lawyer said to him, speaking across an interrogation table with a cup of coffee between his hands, going cold. Akira had to be calm, he had to be polite, he had to be unthreatening. He would hear countless soundbites from the media and the people around him, calling him delinquent, menace, danger, exactly what’s wrong with kids these days--and he would have to rise to none of it. Whatever Akira Kurusu might have become was washed away, carefully folded up into a shiny and inoffensive package. 

And it hadn’t helped. He’d still been charged and kicked out of school. He still hears whispers as he walks down the hall, weathers constant lectures about how lucky he is, how he doesn’t deserve the second chances being offered him. He thought, at first, that because he knew that he’d saved that woman, that she’d been blackmailed into testifying against him, that it would be alright. _He_ knew he was innocent. 

But after a point, who cares if you’re innocent when everyone thinks you’re guilty? If he is going to be treated like a criminal, then fucked if that isn’t exactly what he’s going to be. A monstrous boy with the simmering thrill of violence in his eyes

Joker raises a hand and his persona scorches his insides, a violent hammer of light falling on the head of the shadow bird. It’s dust before it hits the ground, and he has never felt more alive. 

-

Iwai feels like death. 

Lots of ways feel like death, honestly, with different levels of hyperbole. He’s felt like death bleeding into a gutter from two gunshot wounds, and he’s felt like death watching his sister flatline in a hospital bed. He’s also felt like death after a particularly determined night of drinking. 

This is an altogether different experience. This is full-body shivers and a dizziness that forces him to his knees as soon as the escalator deposits him on the bottom floor. He tries to breathe through it, blinking away the haze that keeps threatening to overwhelm him long enough to see a line of turnstiles and a tunnel leading away into the darkness. Voices call to one another, accompanied with what sounds like an engine revving. Who would bring a car down here? 

Why had he come down here? He thought he’d seen Akira and some friends, but maybe he’d got it wrong. This isn’t a good place, it’s not-- 

_Well, well. You are a very long way from home._

The words come from everywhere. He hears them, he feels them, he sees them float across his vision. There is something tight and straining at the center of him and he knows, just knows that if he doesn’t get out of here he will die. Explode. He’ll just be a gangster-shaped smudge on the tile floor and there will be no one left to cook Kaoru mediocre stir fries or pack him a lunch a couple times a week. He used to do it more when he was in Elementary school. Even learned to make little rabbits out of apple slices. 

_Too late,_ the voice says. _Far too late for you._

He slides down the wall. The dirty floor is so cold and Iwai feels the life leeching from his body, pulled down into the ground and spread out. This place--whatever it is--is feeding off of him. 

An unknowable amount of time later, he hears voices again. A whole lot of them, all talking excitedly on top of each other. 

“Hey--hold on a second.” 

“Mona, is something wrong?” 

“No, I just--.” The voice comes closer. It is high and bright, like a child’s voice. But the...thing standing in front of Iwai doesn’t look like a child at all. It flicks an ear at him. “There’s something a little off about the cognition here, that’s all.” 

“Isn’t _all_ of--” Some garbled word that Iwai can’t understand, “--A little bit off?” 

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. Anyway, Joker, that last attack was amazing! I’ve never seen you use a skill like that before!” 

The sweep of a dark coat, a flash of white, and a chillingly familiar voice. “Don’t be a suck up, Morgana. You’re still not getting sushi for dinner.” 

“I don’t do everything for sushi, you know!” 

_Morgana_. He’s heard that name before, somewhere. But right now he can barely remember his own name. He can barely tell up from down. All of them, whoever they are, walk right past him before it even occurs to him to call out for help. 

He doesn’t know how he gets out. Willpower, what the fuck ever. He does have vague recollections of someone taking his hand, someone with hair blonde enough to shimmer in the dark, whose clothes drift around them like they’re floating, who tugs on Iwai’s hand the way Kaoru used to whenever he saw something in a department store or corner shop that he wanted, dragging Iwai along. 

“Be more careful,” she advises him at the base of the escalator. “This isn’t the place for you. And he isn’t the person.” 

The next thing he knows he’s standing outside the station, rain coming down in a soft mist. Tourists crowd around Hachiko, snapping pictures. A cat has taken shelter from the rain between the statue’s front paws. The lights across the street make Iwai’s vision swim, but he can _breathe_ again. He looks down, half-expecting to still see someone holding his hand, but he’s alone. The rain is cold on his face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you're really in the shit now, baby.


	8. Chapter 8

A week on and Iwai has assembled a few plausible theories 

His favorite is a gas leak, followed very narrowly by controlled substances. He scours the news sites for mentions of anything in Shibuya--methane, carbon monoxide, something in the water supply. The symptoms line up. Dizziness, fatigue, extreme disorientation, muscle weakness. No hallucinations, however. No visions of small fuzzy creatures with squeaky voices or little ghost girls holding your hand to lead the way out of hell. And he can’t forget Akira vanishing down those nonexistent steps, or his delirious laughter in the dark. 

It’s late October and Akira hasn’t answered any of his texts. Even as Iwai has began to gather more threads of him--the doctor, the cafe, the receipt for the dress he’d crammed into his wallet--he vanishes. Dissolve back into smoke and shadow. 

Fallen leaves pile up damp and fragrant in the park behind Iwai’s apartment building, the slow sway of yellow dancing in and out of view from the windows. Kaoru has grown enough over the summer that his winter uniform is too short for him. Time is slipping by faster and faster every year. 

Untouchable gets an unexpected rush of business a few days before Halloween and on into next month. Iwai actually sells out of a few models. The tension in the city is ratcheting tighter. Something has wrapped its fingers around Tokyo’s throat and is slowly tightening down. 

Kaoru says the Phantom Thieves have killed someone. That’s why everyone is so afraid. The latest target died during a press conference, right after confessing to his crimes. Doesn’t matter than no one can _make_ you have a cardiac arrest, but that doesn’t seem to matter. The city’s defenders of truth and beauty have suddenly become frightening. More than just a silly website and something to spread across gossip pages. Whatever sense of fabricated justice people had built up for them had come crashing down, and no one feels safe. 

Personally, Iwai thinks the dude got what he deserved. He’d been corporate trash, hardly better than a common thug. And frankly Big Bang burgers suck. 

A rainy autumn night, chilly and bleak. It’s a half hour until close, and the lights from the colored sign across the street draw watery patterns on Untouchable’s windows. Iwai counts cash, idly, lost in thought. He has to start over a couple times. 

The door swings open, a wash of cold, damp air fluttering the pages of his ledgers, the evening’s mist curling around the feet of his first customer in hours. 

Akira lets the door bang shut behind him. 

Iwai drops his pen. His heart bounces up into his throat, a spike of adrenaline washing through him. “Started to think you’d skipped town.” He flattens affect from his voice. “You lose your phone or something?” 

“I’ve been busy.” Akira looks across the counter, at the order forms and receipts strewn around like confetti, everything covered in a fine layer of dust. Iwai’s been busy too, alright? 

“It’s been a slow night." 

Akira glances at the beer bottle beside the cash register. “I can see that.” 

Iwai bites down on the reflexive offer of a drink. He doesn’t hang out with many people under 20. Though he doesn’t actually know how old Akira is. He remembers him mentioning his birthday is in November. Up close, he looks older than he had last time he'd seen him. Or maybe that’s just the lines of exhaustion around his eyes and mouth, the sunken cheeks. Fuck, does he not have the cash for food? Does his guardian not feed him? Does he blow all his wages on airsoft guns? Instead of buying him a dress, maybe he should have bought him groceries. Jesus Christ. 

“Where have you been?” he asks before he can stop himself. To make it a little less needy, he adds, “Your fingers heal up?” 

The lines on Akira’s brow deepen with confusion. “Fingers? Oh.” He holds up his left hand. “Right. Yeah, it’s good. All better. I mean, it still hurts a little, it’s only been a few weeks.” Iwai wonders if he’s high again. He also wonders how he managed to hold up the wrong hand. His right hand had the broken fingers; Iwai distinctly remembers seeing him cradling it when he’d stood behind him to unzip the dress. 

Again, not a smoking gun. Really all Iwai has is a pile of evidence that comes together to not anything at all, puzzle pieces without a frame to fit them in. The weapons, the weird shit he fences, the ebbs and flows of his moods. Forgetting about a serious injury. Disappearing into a gas-filled hallucination tunnel. None of it leads to anything. 

Or it wouldn’t, if right then Akira’s cat hadn’t wriggled out of his bag and hopped onto the counter. It sits down on top of a stack of file folders, flicks an ear, and says, “Wow, it sure is dirty in here.” 

Iwai drops his beer. 

The bottle shatters. He stands up so fast his stool falls over. The two sounds layer together in the rainy quiet of the shop. The cat yowls and leaps into Akira’s arms. 

“I knew it!” it shouts, triumphant. Its piercing blue eyes narrow, intelligent and focused. 

“That--.” Iwai’s voice sticks to itself. “That fucking cat is talking.” 

The cat purrs, a rolling, amusing sound. “We got us a real genius here, Joker. I knew he was the one whose cognition I felt. He must have followed us into Mementos!” 

Iwai braces himself against the counter, putting his hand right into the puddle of beer. He is staggering under the weight of multiple realizations at once. It is an odd feeling, to have your ridiculous flights of fancy confirmed as fact. Akira is talking to his cat like he does it everyday and just like in the bar fight, it’s as though the Akira from reality and the Akira from his fantasies have merged into one alarming creature. 

“Is he right?” 

“Huh?” 

Akira blows out a slow breath. “Did you follow me? Are you keeping tabs on me?” 

“Of course not!” Iwai doesn’t know which part he’s denying, only that he hates the accusation in Akira’s voice. The mangled trust. “Why--why does your cat suddenly talk?” That seems like the most pressing issue here. 

“I’ve always been able to talk.” Morgana preens. “You only just learned how to listen.” 

“Morgana isn’t a cat,” Akira says, like this explains everything. 

“And what about you?” 

Akira’s lips pull away from his teeth. “I’m not a cat either.” 

“But you’re...human?” God, how is this his life. 

The smile gets wider. In the dark his teeth look sharper than they should be. “In a way.” 

Morgana makes that purring sound again. He's laughing. “You drama queen.” He wrestles himself free of Akira's arms and drops to the floor. “I’m going on a walk. Don’t do anything reckless.” He waits imperiously for Akira to open the door, then slinks out into the night. He might not be a cat, but he sure acts like one. 

“You had to have been following me,” Akira says, as he slinks back to the counter. He might not be a cat, but fuck if he doesn’t move like one sometimes. Watching him do it always sends little shivers up Iwai’s arms and down into his belly. He has the mad desire to put his fingers in Akira’s hair. Not to pull, just to stroke. 

“What?” He’s staring. He forces his eyes back to Akira’s face. 

“The only way you can hear Morgana speak is if you hear him in the metaverse first. And the only way you could have gotten in is with one of us, unless--.” His eyes narrow, shrewd. “Can I see your phone?” 

“My phone?” 

“Yes, your phone.” Akira’s voice is steady, his patience crystalline. He holds out a hand. “Unlock it first.” 

Iwai is halfway to obeying before he remembers that he’s the grown up here, he’s the boss. This little fucker doesn’t get to come in and start ordering him around. “Your cat just called you a drama queen, and now you want to see my phone?” 

Akira wriggles his fingers. They are slender and perfect, no sign that they’ve ever been broken. Hands don’t heal smooth. Iwai’s seen (and caused) enough injuries to know that. 

“Did you really believe he was a therapy cat?” 

“I don’t fucking know.” Iwai rubs a palm to his forehead. “I just thought you were a weirdo.” 

Akira’s razorblade smile makes an appearance. “Doesn’t stop you from wanting to fuck me.” 

“You’re pushing it, kid.” 

“I am. Now give me your phone, _sir_.” 

Iwai gives him his phone. 

Akira flicks through the screens, laying the it on the counter so Iwai can watch him do it. He opens a folder where Iwai has shoved all the apps he doesn’t use but can’t delete. After a few seconds he hands it back. “You don’t have it.” 

“Don’t have what?” 

“The app that lets you enter the metaverse. So you must have followed us to Mementos, it’s the only explanation.” 

Broken glass crunches under the soles of Iwai’s boots. “Lock the door. I need another fucking drink for this.” 

 

He downs another beer before he feels equipped to deal with this situation. He wishes he still had that bottle of whisky he used to keep back here. He’d finished it off a couple months ago with Tsuda, when they’d still been pretending civility. 

Akira wears the placid smile that Iwai has comes to know means nothing at all. He has placed himself near the exit, with his back to the wall. It’s tactical. In fact, most of what he does, how he moves his weight, places his body, speaks of someone who is no stranger to a fight. Iwai doesn’t know why he’d never noticed it before. 

“So are you gonna tell me how you do it?” 

Akira cocks his head. 

“The Phantom Thieving.” The world has softened around the edges, Iwai’s thoughts criss-crossing. “That’s what you are, right? How do you get all the stuff you bring me, all those goddamn metal scraps.” 

Akira rotates his neck, the crack audible from across the room. “Why don’t I show you instead?” 

Something ignites inside Iwai, a burner catching fire, blue flame spreading out in a ring. “Show me? What do you--.” 

Akira’s hand drifts down to his hips, and for one topsy-turvy second Iwai thinks he’s going to unbutton his pants, but he just pulls out his phone. 

Iwai takes another long pull on his beer. “What, does that cat of yours have a mobile? Are you gonna--.” 

Akira taps the screen. “Shut up,” he says, and changes. 

The bottom drops out of Iwai’s stomach, because _everything_ changes. 

He has only experienced this once before, but the scarlet ripple, the slow contortion of shapes in his peripheral vision fills him with a nauseous recognition. The back room of Untouchable is the most familiar place in his life. It becomes an uncharted landscape. A house of mirrors. 

And Akira…

Christ, where does he start. 

The white slash of a mask covers only a small portion of his face, but it still utterly transforms him. It’s shaped like a smile, giving him two mouths instead of one, a pale grin for his eyes. His high school blazer becomes a long black coat of fitted leather, flared at his hips. His shirt and pants are vaguely victorian, but also remind Iwai of a western warrior’s cuirass. His gloves are as red as arterial blood. 

He looks down at himself. “Interesting.” 

“Was--.” Iwai unsticks his throat. “Was that not supposed to happen?” 

“My clothes only change when I’m perceived as a threat.” Heeled boots click on tiles. “Do I scare you, Iwai-san?” 

“You--.” Iwai’s palms are slippery. He resists the urge to wipe them on his jeans. “Akira--.” 

“It’s Joker here.” 

_Joker_. It suits him, with the wild hair and the smile, the magician’s finery and the killer’s hands. Like clothes, the name seems to draw together his strangeness, polish it up and put it on display. 

“Where did you get them?” he asks. “The--fuck, do you have some other middle-aged creep sending you clothes?” 

Akira--Joker--laughs. “I gave them to me. Sort of. It’s my cognition of what I think a Phantom Thief should look like. My understanding of myself.” 

The air is tinged red. Iwai doesn’t feel quite as sick as he had down in that tunnel, but he doesn’t feel _right_. “Is this the same as where I followed you?” 

“Not exactly. Mementos is kind of uniquely dangerous.” 

“Like you.” 

Iwai doesn’t mean to say it aloud, but he’s glad he does because it delights Akira. Joker. Fuck. Whoever he is. He’s seen little glimpses of this boy before, but now he’s here in front of him, like a lightning flash holding steady. 

“So all the weapons I sold you--.” 

Akira pulls out a knife. Iwai isn’t sure from where. It suddenly just exists in his hands. He recognizes it; he’d sold it to him the last time he’d been in. Then, of course, it had been rubber. 

“Everything in the metaverse depends on cognition, so the more realistic the better.” 

Iwai laughs, because this is the least realistic experience he’s ever had. He would think he’s dreaming, but the last dream he’d had was standing in line for a curry shop. He isn’t imaginative enough to make shit like this up. 

Glass shatters, and at first Iwai think he’s managed to smash his second beer. But this beer is in a can, and the sound came from out in the main room. And it is far too loud. More like windows breaking, accompanied by a high, gurgling wail. No human throat should be able to make that sound, and Iwai is pretty sure no animal one either. The skin on his back practically gets up and crawls away. 

“What the fuck is that?” 

Akira tenses, body becoming like the knife. Sleek and sharp and deadly. “Shadows.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updates may slow down after this, since I've got some deadlines for irl stuff coming up. Anyway! Thank you for reading!


	9. Chapter 9

Honestly, Akira thought Iwai had known sooner. 

“Like...what the heck does he think we’re using the weapons for?” Futaba mused a couple weeks earlier, before things really started to unravel. They’re spending the afternoon working on The Plan, the Secret One, which really just means Akira fucks around on his phone and Morgana pretends to understand what Futaba is doing on her laptop. 

“A school play?” he suggests. 

“Shooting pigeons,” Akira says. 

“Fake heists!”   
Akira raises his phone over his head for better signal. “Sexual roleplay.” 

“Gross!” Morgana says. 

“Okay smartasses.” Futaba chews on a cuticle, screen reflecting opaque squares onto her glasses. “Then what does he think when you try to sell him all that random junk we find in Palaces?” 

Akira shrugs. “He just tells me I should be grateful.” 

Which he always is. If Iwai didn’t work against his own business interests to buy horseshit, they’d be in trouble. A tingling warmth spreads down to his stomach as he remembers the smoky rasp of his questions when he watches Akira try out a new model. “You like that? Don’t break it.” 

Whether he was flirting or mocking or just really, really awkward, it had all taken up an active place in Akira’s fantasies. _“You like that? You should be grateful.”_

Morgana isn’t the only one to sense the unusual distortion in Mementos that drizzly evening, and Akira agrees that the best test is just for Morgana to run his mouth in Untouchable. Discovering that Iwai is following Akira is..well, it’s a lot of things. Flattering. Also annoying. It flavors life with a hint of the old claustrophobia of his hometown. Tokyo lets him feel anonymous, and the mask makes him anonymous. Iwai makes him feel caught, held captive in a way he both hates and finds oddly scintillating. 

He’s playing with fire, like pressing on in a Palace when his team is weaving with exhaustion, like making deals with Shadows much stronger than he is. He’d invited Iwai to stay the night, but really they’re all just fantasies. Just shots in the dark. He had been unprepared to hear anything but echoes. 

But now everything is different. Now Joker stands in the cognitive version of Untouchable and sees the blasted shock in Iwai’s eyes. Another feeling Joker can’t quite untangle. Two parts of his life that are not supposed to touch. In Palaces he drinks in his enemies’ fear, transmutes it to the shivering, gleeful power that lets him rend Shadows apart. He feels a little pulse of that now, and he can’t help pushing, stalking forward with a swagger. _“Do I scare you?”_

This isn’t a Palace, but Iwai has a strong enough cognitive attachment to it for Joker’s form to react. He is officially an intruder. Something catches fire under his skin. 

Iwai is struggling, swaying on his stool. Joker remembers what being in the metaverse without a persona had felt like--bad. Like being underwater. He wants to get in closer, pull him up, see what it feels like to touch someone with the thrill of the other world in his veins. He’d probably have done it, too, but then he feels the buzzing at the base of his skull. 

Futaba is the navigator, but all of them can sense the Shadows. He feels them an instant before the glass shatters. He’s never fought a Shadow outside of a Palace or Mementos before. Normal places just don’t have the necessary concentration of distorted desires. So why here?

Maybe he is the distortion. Joker. Maybe anywhere he enters they’ll find him. 

Iwai goes as stiff as a spooked rabbit at the noise, and when Joker skids into the front of the shop, he’s right behind him. 

Joker presses a hand to the center of his chest. He can feel his heartbeat against his fingertips. “You should say behind me.” 

Iwai blinks. His eyes keep cycling in and out of focus, palms leaving sweaty patches on his jeans. 

“I can fight them,” Joker says. “You can’t.” Then he turns and vaults through the shattered front window and out into the street. 

The Shadows don’t seem to want to come into Untouchable. Maybe it’s like a safe room, or they just think they have a better shot at Joker out in the open. Morgana would know, but Morgana isn’t here, probably isn’t even in the metaverse, still wandering Shibuya doing Cat Things. 

The Shadows here are nothing special--pixies and incubi and those bondage angels. Joker hasn’t seen Shadows this weak since Kamoshida’s Palace, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to go easy on them. Elation runs from the base of his neck to the tips of his toes, because he knows what kind of fight this is going to be. 

An exhibition fight. 

So many personas to choose from, to call forth from the sea inside him. He is a constant, seething mass of potential. Iwai’s attention sizzles against his nerves, his awe spurring him on, and it’s only Arsene who will do. Every persona fits him--he can slip in and out of them with ease--but only Arsene was truly made for him. 

He takes out all three shadows with a single mudo spell. None of them are weak to darkness, but it doesn’t matter. They screech, the spell wreathing them, nails puncturing their hearts and lungs, tearing them into shreds of greasy vapor. 

From inside the jagged windows of the airsoft shop, Iwai swears long and low and disbelieving. 

_You’re hungry today_ , Arsene whispers. 

Joker laughs. “Always.” 

More Shadows flood in from the street, slipping through the fog. The rain here is entirely conceptual--Akira doesn’t even feel it. The Shadows come and he kills them. He uses darkness, light, magic building up inside him and released in a vicious slice. He pulls out his knife and fights them hand-to-hand, Arsene picking him up and throwing him at the Shadows. His euphoria mounts as the rain thunders down. 

“Where are they all coming from?” he shouts out loud, but there isn’t anyone here to answer. He hasn’t ever fought alone before. There’s always at least been Morgana to criticize his form or his style or his goddamn hair. Joker takes another angel out with a lightning spell, and he feels that one, the raw scrape of magic in his guts. He needs to rest, recharge. He needs a coffee.

_I advise retreat for now_. 

“Yeah, thanks for that.” 

He kills a pixie with his knife, its little body disintegrating around the blade. And then out of the rain comes what he’s been fearing--a humanoid monster with four arms, a sword in every hand, a leering face. Fuck. He’s had trouble with this breed of Shadow with a whole team backing him up, and now--. 

Fuck, there’s more than one. 

“Lilith!” he banishes Arsene, reaching for the grinning woman with the snake draped over her shoulders. Not the aesthetic he’s going for, but he needs her spirit-drain ability. 

Pain lurches from the base of his spine in sluggish jolts. A black and gold beast has lumbered up and taken a bite out of him. Joker’s knees hit the ground, and he feels unbelievably alone. No shouts of “Joker!” or “Somebody help him!” No Futaba telling him to hold on while she hacks a way out for them. 

_Pride cometh before a fall_. He can almost hear Igor laughing in his ear. _Such a shame_. 

More pain, a hard rushing in his ears, and then an agonized yelp as the monster bearing down on him explodes. Forcing himself to his feet, he looks back to the lighted square of Untouchable’s window. Iwai is braced against the dash, a replica break-action shotgun pressed against one shoulder. He slides shaking fingers into the breast pocket of his jacket, pushing another couple slugs into the barrels and snapping it shut. 

He fires. Joker flinches, and just above him something screams. The Shadows around him scatter. He staggers forward, leaning in through the shattered window and grabbing Iwai around the wrist. He is feverishly hot. 

“We’re running.” 

\--

They run. 

Iwai can barely feel his legs. His vision is spotting grey at the corners, and somewhere along the line he’d lost his gun. He has to be dreaming, hallucinating. He’d taken Kaoru to a sci-fi flick and then had a psychotic break, become unable to tell fantasy from reality. He certainly hadn’t just watched his part-timer transform into a masked cat burglar with a monster in high heels erupting from his back. 

“I can’t just leave my shop!” Iwai shouts, belatedly. They’re already streets away, the lights of Shibuya stretched into elongated, haunted-house versions of themselves. 

Akira doesn't look back. His feet kick up splashes of red, his boots silent against the cement. In fact, everything is silent. The rain, the cars passing in the road, the people milling in and out of the nighttime shops. None of them look around as Akira and Iwai tear past. They aren't real. They're just props.

He is so focused on not falling the fuck over that when it all comes rushing back, he doesn’t notice. It's all he can do to stay upright and not lose sight of Akira. He's right front of him, close enough to reach out and touch, but he still expects him to vanish. Rend apart just like those weird kinky monsters had. 

Seriously. He's definitely never seen an angel in bondage before and he's not sure he ever wants to again.

Rain drips down from his hair to his nose, and it's then he realizes he can feel that rain. He's getting wet. He's getting soaked. Traffic hums on the main road a few blocks away, and although Iwai’s body aches like he's been dragged belly-down across gravel, he no longer feels like his head is going to explode. Like his thoughts are made of helium and are pressing up against the inside of his skull.

"Kid, slow down--."

Akira stops, skidding through a puddle. They fetch up against a bare brick wall between a comic book store and a bakery that has had a "going out of business" sign in its front window for as long as anyone can remember.

"Fuck." Akira swears on every breath out. "Fuck, fuck, _fuck_."

Rain plasters his curls to his forehead, two drops trailing down his cheeks to trace delicate arcs. His eyes close, lashes trembling with moisture. After the silence of that other world, reality is impossibly loud. His eyes open back up, focusing slowly. He's back in his school clothes again and the mask is gone, but Iwai is never going to be able to look at him again without seeing it, or the mania in his eyes when he drove his knife into a monster's soft underbelly.

"Now you know all my secrets," Akira says hoarsely. “You should tell me one of yours."

"Kid..." Iwai growls. A reminder. A warning.

Two callused hands cup Akira's cheeks. Iwai is consternated to realize they belong to him. He feels disconnected from his body, like he is standing slightly outside of it and watching it make bad choices.

Akira makes a soft, drowning noise, snarling his fists in the front of Iwai's coat. His mouth is wet and impossibly warm. Iwai devours it, drinks in the shocked little breaths. Rain hits the back of his neck. His whole body is shaking. He is distantly aware that he's cold.

Akira is trembling too, but from the little chuckles winding up from his chest. “Was it good for you too?” 

Iwai makes a sound that can’t decide whether it’s a laugh or a groan. He isn’t turned on--his senses are too scrambled--but he does know that all he wants to do is keep touching Akira, damn the consequences. 

Akira clings to his shoulders; Iwai is the only thing keeping him on his feet. Funny, because Iwai feels like his any minute he’s gonna hit the pavement. The sluice gates are open, and every disastrous possibility comes pouring out. Akira is a nightmare creature, a Phantom Thief, and he is arching into Iwai’s touch and sucking on his tongue--artless, messy kisses. Iwai hasn’t been kissed like this in years. 

Iwai doesn’t make the decision. At least, not consciously. But suddenly water is soaking into the thighs of his jeans. He’s on his knees, pushing up Akira’s shirt and sucking kisses into the feverish warmth of his stomach. The damp waistband of his pants rasps against Iwai’s chin. 

_“Ah!”_ Akira fumbles fingers through his hair, trying to get a hold. 

The wail of a siren from an adjacent street shatters reality back in around them. It isn’t directed at them--there’s no floodlights or swat team with a megaphone shouting for Iwai to get that teenagers dick away from his mouth. But it reminds him of where they are. The rain and the dark and the trip through an alternate reality has made him feel like they’re the only people for miles, instead of in the center of a densely populated city. 

This isn’t some fairytale they’re playing out. He is a grown man on his knees in front of a high school boy in the middle of Shibuya. And he’s fucking freezing. 

“C’mon.” He climbs to his feet. He can’t meet Akira’s eyes, just watches water drip from his bangs. “Let’s go warm up.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *sigh* find some chill boys


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this is short but i thought I'd put something up so y'all don't think I died. I'm still plugging away at this, just rl has gotten real recently. So updates may stay slow-ish. That said, there probs won't be tooooo many chapters left.

Akira hasn’t bothered to imagine what Iwai’s house might look like. Untouchable is his castle. Seeing him in Crossroads and then across the counter in Leblanc had been strange enough, but now he’s been in _Mementos_ , the _metaverse_. All the walls are crumbling, so it seems only fitting that he is led down two blocks and into a narrow walk-up between a tiny public park and and a convenience store. Cereal boxes bookend a shelf above the stove, corralling a jumble of cooking spices and sticky bottles of soy sauce. Adjoining is a tiny living room with a television even older than Akira’s, and a coffee table sagging under piles of mail.

It’s so incredibly _normal_. 

Iwai flicks on the overhead light and they both wince. He flicks it back off and turns on the dim light above the stove instead. “Make yourself at home,” he says. 

Akira lifts his arms, rain pattering in little plinks of percussion onto the tiles. Iwai revises his statement. “Hold on, stay there, let me just--.” He still sounds vague, and his eyes are a little unfocused.

Or, maybe they aren’t. Maybe it just seems that way because Iwai refuses to _look_ at him. He brushes past, being very careful not to actually touch him, but then reappears from a back room with startling speed, like he doesn’t want to leave Akira alone in his apartment. 

Or maybe he doesn’t want to be alone right now. 

Akira had emerged from his first trip to the metaverse feeling like his world had been gripped with two ghostly hands, hefted, and shaken, and no matter what life would never be the same. It was a deeply unsettling feeling, but also exhilarating. Weightless. He kind of liked it. Still does. But he sees how for someone like Iwai, who has worked so hard to tether himself, to build up his foundations, it could be terrifying. 

Could adults manifest personas? Akira and the rest of the Thieves had only ever met their shadows. 

“Here.” Iwai pushes a lump of clothes at Akira, and he holds them away from his wet uniform. Iwai has changed his shirt. It’s riding up in the back and Akira catches a metronome flash of dark ink, before it’s covered completely. Akira is freezing, but the rough, wet memory of Iwai’s mouth makes him _burn_. 

“Bathroom’s at the end of the hall,” Iwai says over his shoulder. He’s filling the kettle at the sink. 

Akira changes. The clothes are too big for him, and they smell like Iwai. Like Untouchable and cherry lollipops. Akira has told him more than once that cherry is the worst flavor. _Better than smellin’ like cigarettes_. He rubs his hair dry, figuring Iwai would prefer he get a towel dirty than drip all over his floor.

He’s thought more than once about the strange, revolving ways that Iwai and his own life seem to parallel each other. They watch from across counters, through the oily fug of their own baggage. It piles up further and further between them. Akira should know better than to think someone like him could ever have a normal relationship. If dating someone like Iwai could ever be considered _normal_. 

But Iwai had kissed him. In the goddamn rain, like it was a TV drama or one of Futaba’s horny comics.

His phone is lit up with notifications. He slides it into the deep pocket of the sweatpants, where it continues to buzz against his leg. One thing at a time. 

Voices pull him back into the kitchen. Kaoru stands beside the stove, arms wrapped up around himself. He looks shrunken in an oversized t-shirt, hair standing on end. Without his glasses his features are big and distinct, eyes owlish. His smile hesitates for a moment, then flickers up. He and Iwai aren’t related by blood, but spend enough time with someone and you begin to look the same anyway. 

“Hey, Kurusu-kun.” Kaoru rubs at the sleep fogging his features. They must have woken him up. “Are you--is everything okay?” He looks from Akira, then back to Iwai. “What’s going on?” 

Iwai meets Akira’s eyes over Kaoru’s shoulder. He shakes his head just the slightest bit. 

“I--no, Kaoru-kun, we’re just--.” His mind goes scrambling blank, because what are they doing here? 

“It’s just business,” Iwai says. 

Kaoru gives his father a look of consternation so familiar it fills Akira with a buzzing weightlessness. “Business? In the middle of the night? Don’t you have school tomorrow?” he asks Akira. 

“You _absolutely_ have school tomorrow,” Iwai counters. He hands Akira a mug and keeps one for himself, very pointedly not offering one to Kaoru. “Don’t you have a geography test?” 

“Geometry.” Kaoru’s expression goes momentarily shrewd, and something low and nervous coils in Akira’s guts. “Fine. Goodnight.” He slumps off down the hall. 

“Sorry about that,” Iwai says. 

Akira shrugs. “I’m the one who woke him up at midnight.” The silence stretches out flat enough to hear the clock above the table. Akira remembers he’s holding coffee and takes a sip. He almost gags. 

Iwai snorts. “Not all of us can be magical boys living above cafes.”

He waits for the toilet to flush and the sink to run, and Kaoru’s door to close. Then he gestures Akira forward. “It’ll be harder for him to overhear.” And Akira finds himself about to enter Iwai’s bedroom. It’s been one fucker of a day. 

Iwai’s room is neat, sparse, and utterly devoid of character. It might as well have been a guest room. The bed is made, the drawers all neatly closed. There is no dust, no cobwebs swaying in a slow draft. Iwai turns on a lamp with three bulbs, only one of which is not burnt out. He sits down in the only chair in the room, leaving Akira either to stand awkwardly, or sit down on Iwai’s bed. 

He chooses the bed. He isn’t feeling particularly cooperative, or particularly steady on his feet. There’s no script for this. Or at least, he doesn’t have one. 

So instead he tells Iwai everything. 

Well, almost everything. He uses codenames, obscuring personal details. He talks for longer than he means to, until his voice begins to rasp over his consonants. Iwai gets him a glass of water. Outside the rain keeps falling, the night rolling deeper into the dark stillness after midnight. 

Akira has a sense of suspended animation as he talks. This is a coin flip, and he doesn’t know on which side it will land. He feels at once like he is coming clean, and also like he is giving away far too much of himself. 

Iwai is a good listener. He doesn’t interrupt, not even when Akira tells him that the frontrunner for the highest political office in the country may be a psychotic murderer. He leaves out the traitor elements, the certainty that one of their own is actively working against them. That is still a live issue, and he’s pretty sure police stations don’t comment on cases they haven’t’ closed. Neither will he. 

Afterward Iwai is quiet for so long Akira wonders if he might have fallen asleep with his eyes open. In the corner, the little space heater pings. Akira wishes he were closer to it. 

He’s just starting to think he’s going to have to start flicking coins at the side of Iwai’s face, when   
he leans forward, scratches at the underside of his chin and says, “Well.” His hat is gone, lost somewhere between Untouchable and here. Possibly it’s now a part of the metaverse and will respawn the next time he enters. Not that Akira has any plans to bring him back there. “Fuck.” 

Akira laughs, shivery with...what? Fear? Relief? How does anyone ever put a name to their emotions? He feels a hundred lives away from the boy in the mask who had menaced Iwai with his smile. 

“So all the Phantom Thieves have magic monsters that come out of their brains.” Iwai squeezes at the bridge of his nose. “Figures, I guess. And you got--a lot of monsters? How many?” 

Akira shrugs. “A lot.” 

“Hundreds? Thousands?” 

“Not yet. I don’t know if there’s a limit.” 

“But the other Thieves do.” 

“Have a limit? Yeah. They just have one.” Akira makes an expression that feels like a smile but probably isn’t one. “You know when you’re a kid and you feel weird and different from everyone around you, like nobody can understand what it’s like to be you? But then they tell you it isn’t a big deal, everyone feels that way. It’s just part of growing up. You aren’t an outlier, you aren’t uniquely fucked up.” He shrugs. “Except I am. I am a special snowflake weirdo with a bunch of unsolvable problems.” Like a gorgeous, laconic boss who keeps sending mixed signals. 

He could just not say anything, and that would probably solve it. They could put the kiss down to disorientation and adrenaline, the moment catching them up. It doesn’t have to mean anything. 

Akira stands up. “You kissed me.” 

Iwai blinks. The skin beneath his eyes is an exhausted grey. “Kid--.” 

“Stop calling me that,” Akira says, “When you want to shut me up.” 

Iwai stares at him. It’s so unusual to be able to see his eyes when he talks, unshadowed by the brim of his hat. “Can we just not. I--fuck. This is a lot in one night, okay? Can we talk about this in the morning?” 

“Fine,” Akira says, and feels colder than ever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just...just make out.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey you guyyyssss...sorry it's been so long, and sorry that this is another short one. Why is real life so got dang real sometimes?

Iwai sleeps hard. 

He doesn’t expect to. His head is full of meltwater, thoughts washing in and out like a tide. He wouldn’t call himself a particularly hardcore realist, but there’s some things he’s always taken as a given. Magic doesn’t exist. The world he sees everyday--the one made of concrete and cars and fucking _rules_ \--is the only one there is. Reality isn’t malleable, it doesn’t change according to your perception. 

Now he knows better. Now life is never going to be the same. 

It’s a feeling similar to when he’d stood beside his sister’s hospital bed and watched her lose the fight against the endlessly replicating lump of cells in her left breast, when he’d first been tapped for the organization, the first time he’d looked through a rifle scope at someone who had been alive and now wasn’t, because of him. When he’d picked up Kaoru and known--inexplicably--that this wasn’t someone he could just leave behind. 

Akira’s grin. _Why don’t I show you?_ The tangible air of menace that gathered around him and bloomed into a coat and mask. The soft, yielding press of his mouth. 

He thought all of this would definitely keep him awake--it’s honestly a lot to process--but the drag of the hazy exhaustion of that other place proves too much to resist. 

He doesn’t sleep for very long, though. His dreams fade into the sound of the persistent rain, the room lit with the blurry grey light of pre-dawn. He spends a few elastic minutes staring at a pair of eyes beside his bedroom door before he realizes that isn’t a part of his dreams. There really is someone standing there looking at him. At first he thinks it’s Kaoru coming to climb into bed with him after a nightmare like he had when he was a kid. 

“You’re awake.” That isn’t Kaoru’s voice. 

Iwai sits up, reaching automatically for his phone on the nightstand, but he’d left it in the kitchen to charge. He has no idea what time it is. “Now I am.” 

He’d left Akira on the couch out in the living room, his feet sticking out from under a blanket, answering the stream of messages from the rest of the Phantom Thieves. Apparently that damn cat--Morgana--had run off to tell them their leader was currently putting them all at risk by revealing their secrets to his “old gangster boyfriend”. Akira had read that out, smugly grinning. But he isn’t grinning now. 

He looks small in Iwai’s shirt, incongruous. 

“Everything okay?” Iwai turns on the desk lamp. He doesn’t like not being able to see all of Akira’s face. 

Akira doesn’t respond, and for a moment Iwai is sure he’ll turn back to find he’d hallucinated him, but he’s still there, silhouetted in the dark. And he’s staring at the line of Iwai’s back. 

Hell. Something very old and very tired inside Iwai rolls over, disturbed. It’s shame but it’s also relief, because it’s not like there was any way Akira was not going to see it. Although he had hidden it from Kaoru for years, always dressing in his room, never bathing together or anywhere public. They didn’t go to the beach, they didn’t go to pools. No matter how stifling the apartment got in the summer, his shirt stayed on. 

But Akira is different. It doesn’t feels worth hiding anything from him. As if no matter what he does, this boy will uncover every last secret, every hidden, pulsing nerve. The twisting outline of the tiger on his back is only the first of many. 

And now he’s reached an impasse, because if he turns to let Akira see more of it he will be encouraging him, and if he reaches for his shirt it will be like he’s ashamed. So he just sits there. It’s the choice of suspended animation. It’s taking the decision out of his own hands and leaving it in someone else’s. 

Akira comes closer. He reaches out but he doesn’t touch. “It’s not finished.” 

“Never will be,” Iwai grunts. 

“It’s beautiful.” 

People have said that before; women, mostly. Or people who wanted something from him. Marks aren’t supposed to be beautiful, they’re supposed to be permanent. 

“It is what it is,” he says, because he’s not about to hash out his past with the yakuza at four o’clock in the goddamn morning. Or whatever time it is. “Did you need something?” 

Finally, Akira drags his eyes from Iwai’s back and looks him in the face. Maybe it’s because he’s seen that other him, the one in the mask, but there looks to be a delicate glow around his eyes. An otherness in his features. An echo of the fear from the shop fills Iwai, when Akira had advanced on him. He comes closer, and Iwai feels incredibly vulnerable, shirtless with his legs still half under the blanket. 

“Kid,” he begins. “I mean, Akira-kun--.” He swallows. “Whatever it is you think you’re doing, we can’t.” 

Akira slows, but he doesn’t stop. He fills up all of Iwai’s vision. “Not here?” 

Fuck. “Not anywhere.” 

Akira’s gaze must really be fire, because he’s taking up all the oxygen in the room. “You were ready to suck my dick back there in the rain.” 

“That--.” Iwai’s rubs a palm against his eye. “That was--I had just discovered a magic parallel universe full of monsters. I wasn’t really--.” It sounds flimsy, even to him. 

“So what about when you sent me that dress?” Just the slightest hint of a threat. “Was that a mistake too?” 

That was the product of whisky and Lala’s enabling, but he’s not about the say that. “I shouldn’t have done it.” Too little, too fucking late, and he knows that. 

“I wanted to show you something,” Akira says, and then he _moves_. 

And the boy is quick. It’s not quite the otherworldly slither from that other place, where he had almost merged with shadows as he darted across the floor, but it’s between a blink and the next that Iwai is flat on his back with Akira looming up above him. And Iwai isn’t a small man. 

He tugs against Akira’s grip. He gets one hand free but Akira holds on to the other, nails digging into the soft bed of his wrist. He is a dark, blurry shape against the pale ceiling. 

Everything in the center of Iwai’s chest has gone very still; he’s not even sure his heart's still beating. “So now what?” 

Akira reaches into the pocket of his borrowed sweatpants. “I want to show you something.” And for the second time that night he brandishes his phone at Iwai. 

“Hey, hold on--.” He recognizes the crack in the screen that Kaoru pointed out looks like the little dipper. “That’s my phone.” 

Akira lifts a shoulder. “It’s not password protected and you just left it lying around.” 

“I left it in the kitchen of the apartment I own, I wouldn’t call that lying around.” 

Another shrug. He holds it out, the brightness turned up way too high. Iwai squints. 

“What am I looking--.” 

“Right here. You only have like two apps.” On one end of the screen is the chat client, beside the GPS and music folder. On the end of the row is something he’s never seen before--a little red eye in a square of black. Just looking at it opens up a shivering unease inside him. 

Akira takes the phone and puts it in his pinned hand. “We call this the Nav. We use it to access the metaverse.” 

Iwai blinks up at him. “Did you--?” 

Akira shakes his head. “I don’t know how any of us got it. Me and Ryuji were first, then everybody else.”

Ryuji. The noisy yellow one. “Does this make me a goddamn Phantom Thief?” 

“I’m not sure.” He’s so close now, breath sleep-stale and warm on Iwai’s cheek. “But I know someone who might.” Iwai feels the faintest pressure on his fingers, Akira manipulating his thumb, the slight give of the phone screen. Then he sees nothing but the flash of Akira’s smile as he leans down to kiss him, and the room around them dissolves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know i'm edging y'all horribly but trust me okay

**Author's Note:**

> hit me up at spine-and-spite on tumblr.


End file.
